Network content (e.g., website) providers often wish to collect data that describes usage and visitation patterns for their websites and for individual webpages within the sites. This data is often referred to as web analytics data. Such information can be extremely valuable in developing usage statistics for various purposes, including, for example, estimating server load, determining advertising rates, identifying areas of websites that are in need of redesign, and the like.
Web analytics data is often collected via logfile analysis or page tagging. Logfile analysis includes reading logfiles that store a web server's transactions. Page tagging uses executable code on each webpage, such as Java Script, to notify a third party when a webpage is rendered by a browser. For example, the webpage may include a request to a web analytics provider that is embedded within the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code. When the webpage is rendered by a browser at a user's computer, the request is transmitted to the web analytics, thereby notifying the web analytics provider of the rendering of the webpage. In some instances, the request includes a request for an image, and the web analytics provider simply returns a single transparent pixel for display by the browser, thereby fulfilling the request.
The request itself often includes web analytics data, such as data about the user, the user's computer, the content of the webpage, or any other web analytics data that is accessible and of interest. The web analytics provider may parse the request to extract web analytics data contained within the request. The collected web analytics data may be processed and provided to a website administrator for use in assessing and optimizing their website.
The webpage including the embedded request is typically provided via a content server operated, or at least under the direction of a content provider, such as an on-line vendor, media portal, or news website. In some instances, a webpage may include dynamic content that changes often (e.g., daily, hourly, upon a news event, etc.). And in some of those cases, a region of the webpage containing the dynamic content can be relatively static. For example, a webpage may have a top story region that includes the top stories at a given time. Thus, at one time, the top story may be directed to one selectable element (e.g., link, button, etc.) while at another time, the top story may be directed to another selectable element. In some cases, individual selectable elements or links on a webpage may move or relocate to a different part of a webpage over time. For example, a link that was in the top news story location at 1:00 pm may move to a side news story location at 3:00 pm and completely off the webpage the following day. Similarly, duplicate links may exist on a webpage, such as a webpage that duplicates the top news story link in another portion of the page, such as a side portion.
Traditional web analytics techniques suffer in performance for such dynamic content in terms of reliability, storage requirements, and compatibility. As a result, information collected for dynamic content by typical web analytics techniques is less useful.